With conventional dry cleaning processes, the articles to be cleaned are placed in a perforated drum of a machine for dry cleaning. Once the articles to be cleaned are placed inside the machine, the drum is filled with solvent and detergents, and turned until all the dirt is removed from the articles.
In reality, the dry cleaning process is carried out via humidity, i.e., instead of washing the articles with soap and water or with detergents, they are treated within a chamber with easily volatile solvents which contain water in suspension via the detergent, but which do not wet clothing or textile articles. Some of the solvents used in this process are perchloroethylene, trichloroethano, trichloro-trifluorethane, carbon tetrachloride, trichloro-ethylene, tetrachloro-ethylene, naptha, etc. These dissolve and remove dirt without any need of wetting and scrubbing the weave.
Once the cleaning process has taken place, the clothing articles or textiles must spin at a high speed in order to extract excess solvent, followed by drying of the articles which is carried out by having them turn slowly in hot air.
While the latter operation is being carried out, the solvent used is filtered to remove the solid dirt particles, followed by a distillation process, which removes the soluble contaminants, leaving again the solvent to re-initiate again another dry cleaning process.
However, one of the principal cost problems of the dry cleaning machines for drying cleaning clothing or electronic parts, is that, once the cleaning, extracted and drying operation has been completed, the air found in the machine still contains some dissolved solvent which is lost at the moment that the main door is open, to discharge the clothing or textile articles from the machine.
This type of natural process losses, added to the losses by leaks or gaskets or badly sealed pipes, result in these types of machines use up a large amount of solvent, thereby increasing costs considerably.
On the other hand, there exists contamination problems due these losses.
Due to the above, the present invention refers to an additional solvent recuperation method for dry cleaning industrial textiles, uniforms, dresses, clothing in general and other types of products, thus reducing the consumption of solvents and environmental contamination.